SHOWPAD ✦ SHIPPED
Cross platform UX/UI integration overhaul
Platform
0→1
Enterprise
I led design on a 0→1 internal intelligence platform — owning the strategy and the craft, and shipping v1 in five months.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Skills
0 → 1 ∙ user research ∙ integration
Team
1 PM, 4 Eng, me
Timeline
SEP 2025 - NOV 2026
OVERVIEW
Stitching a bolted on acquisition into one platform
Coach is Showpad's learning management product, acquired as LearnCore and never fully integrated. As lead product designer I led the effort to align it with the rest of the platform across visual design, architecture, and behavior, owning research through delivery.
Coach had run as a semi separate product for years, so aligning it meant reconciling genuinely different mental models and workflows, not just repainting screens.
OUTCOMES
20% fewer complaint tickets, one platform
Customer complaint tickets dropped by about 20% as the work rolled out, driven by steady UX improvements, quality of life updates, and cross platform unification. Four disjointed product areas now behave as one coherent platform.
The drop came from continuous improvement rather than one big release. Small fixes and pattern alignment compounded over time into fewer reasons for users to file a ticket in the first place.
-20%
complaints
customer complaint tickets were reduced by through continuous UX improvements and cross-platform product unification.
Business case
The screens driving sales were flying blind 🫣
When Showpad acquired LearnCore in 2018, the products were integrated in a 9 month rush. That left lasting gaps between the LMS and the rest of the platform in UX, systems, and interactions, and users felt it as friction and a steep learning curve.
Goals
- consistent visual design
- aligned product concepts and architecture
- cohesive UX and behavior patterns
- fewer customer complaints across Coach and the platform
Current State
Diving into customer complaints with interviews
I ran research interviews across all four products to pin down where users actually struggled. Support tickets were flagging the same issues in parallel, which confirmed the need for change and surfaced use cases the content product had never accounted for.
Interviews were captured through Meeting IQ transcription and organized into a structured spreadsheet of responses, so every pain point traced back to a real user rather than an assumption.
User Interviews
Spreadsheet of user answers to interview questions.
Screenshot of Showpad Meeting IQ transcription of user interviews.
Identified Gaps
Four facets, four frustrated personas
Coach breaks into four areas, each with its own primary user, and every one had friction. Creation was a slow save after save flow for admins, storage was hard to navigate, consumption hid the next and back controls from sales reps, and insights spoke to the wrong persona under a cluttered UI.
- Creation
ADMIN
- UI is very confusing and doesn't not aid with findability.
- Cross platform users are used to the content library UX and have to shift mindsets/learn a new pattern to use coach library.
- Creation
COACH
CONTENT
- Storage
ADMIN
- Users often miss the previous and next arrows in the header to navigate through learning content and use the sidebar instead.
- They believe they are complete but the UI is not which is confusing.
- Our customer's course creators actually ended up custom designing the first page to instructing users to use the top arrows... 😬
consumption
COACH
CONTENT
- Consumption
ADMIN
- Users often miss the previous and next arrows in the header to navigate through learning content and use the sidebar instead.
- They believe they are complete but the UI is not which is confusing.
- Our customer's course creators actually ended up custom designing the first page to instructing users to use the top arrows... 😬
consumption
COACH
CONTENT
- Insights (BEFORE)
sales manager
- Inefficient flow; steps are linear and require saving after each single one.
- Users want to a tool to build/draft them faster.
Use cases and feature mapping
coach only
Unifying Patterns
If it works the same, it should live the same
I mapped the parallels between Coach and the platform's Content product so any shared concept would sit in the same place and behave the same way. Containers, components, information, and comments each got a single consistent pattern instead of two competing ones.
Containers and components
COACH
A course holds media but also tests & PitchIQs
CONTENT
A page holds media, text, etc components
Terminology for identical concepts
COACH
Information = no title
Comments = "Discussion" button in header
CONTENT
Information = “Details” tab next to comments.
Comments = “Comments” tab in side panel next to details
Design Refinement
Detailed enough to build without guessing
I turned the direction into extensive flows that covered edge cases and spelled out how each feature should behave and animate.
The specs went down to drag and drop zones and interaction states so engineering could turn them into an interactive POC for testing. Logging bugs and improvements as we went kept quality tight through every release.
Design refinement & interactivity mock up
E2E flow mock ups
ex. of mocking drag and drop zones and interactions for developers to translate into an interactive POC for testing.
Beta testing
Key customers stress test at scale before full roll-out
Every feature ran through playtests and a beta with priority customers to catch bugs and odd behavior before it shipped.
ex. of bug and improvement logging
Platform Alignment Achieved
Four products, finally moving as one
The redesigned features shipped across creation, storage, consumption, and insights, bringing Coach into full alignment with the rest of the platform. What used to be four disconnected experiences now looks and behaves as one.
Alignment reached past the web app. Coach capabilities came to the Showpad iOS app alongside its existing content features, so the unified experience followed users onto mobile too.
- Creation
ADMIN
Creation
COACH
CONTENT
- Storage
ADMIN
storage
COACH
CONTENT
- Consumption
ADMIN
consumption
COACH
CONTENT
- Insights
Sales manager
Insights
bEFORE
AFTER
REFLECTION
Reduction in customer complaints is a lagging indicator
The 20% drop in complaint tickets told us the integration was working, but it's a lagging signal. It says something got better without telling you which change actually did the work. If I ran this again, I'd put more direct measures in place from the start, task success and time to complete on the core flows, so wins are something we can see and attribute instead of infer after the fact. There's also more to finish. A few of the gaps the content product never accounted for are still open, and any product still living outside the unified patterns is a candidate to pull in next. For a platform stitched together under a 2018 deadline, getting it to finally move as one was the milestone. Keeping it measurable is the next one.
SHOWPAD ✦ SHIPPED
Cross platform UX/UI integration overhaul
Platform
0→1
Enterprise
I led design on a 0→1 internal intelligence platform — owning the strategy and the craft, and shipping v1 in five months.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Skills
0 → 1 ∙ user research ∙ integration
Team
1 PM, 4 Eng, me
Timeline
SEP 2025 - NOV 2026
← Back
Summary
Deep Dive
OVERVIEW
Stitching a bolted on acquisition into one platform
Coach is Showpad's learning management product, acquired as LearnCore and never fully integrated. As lead product designer I led the effort to align it with the rest of the platform across visual design, architecture, and behavior, owning research through delivery.
Coach had run as a semi separate product for years, so aligning it meant reconciling genuinely different mental models and workflows, not just repainting screens.
OUTCOMES
20% fewer complaint tickets, one platform
Customer complaint tickets dropped by about 20% as the work rolled out, driven by steady UX improvements, quality of life updates, and cross platform unification. Four disjointed product areas now behave as one coherent platform.
The drop came from continuous improvement rather than one big release. Small fixes and pattern alignment compounded over time into fewer reasons for users to file a ticket in the first place.
-20%
complaints
customer complaint tickets were reduced by through continuous UX improvements and cross-platform product unification.
Business case
A 9 month rush left years of debt
When Showpad acquired LearnCore in 2018, the products were integrated in a 9 month rush. That left lasting gaps between the LMS and the rest of the platform in UX, systems, and interactions, and users felt it as friction and a steep learning curve.
Goals
- consistent visual design
- aligned product concepts and architecture
- cohesive UX and behavior patterns
- fewer customer complaints across Coach and the platform
Current State
Diving into customer complaints with interviews
I ran research interviews across all four products to pin down where users actually struggled. Support tickets were flagging the same issues in parallel, which confirmed the need for change and surfaced use cases the content product had never accounted for.
Interviews were captured through Meeting IQ transcription and organized into a structured spreadsheet of responses, so every pain point traced back to a real user rather than an assumption.
User Interviews
Spreadsheet of user answers to interview questions.
Screenshot of Showpad Meeting IQ transcription of user interviews.
Identified Gaps
Four facets, four frustrated personas
Coach breaks into four areas, each with its own primary user, and every one had friction. Creation was a slow save after save flow for admins, storage was hard to navigate, consumption hid the next and back controls from sales reps, and insights spoke to the wrong persona under a cluttered UI.
- Creation
ADMIN
- UI is very confusing and doesn't not aid with findability.
- Steps are linear and require saving after each single one.
- Users want to a tool to build/draft them faster.
Creation
COACH
CONTENT
- Storage
ADMIN
- UI is very confusing and doesn't not aid with findability.
- Cross platform users are used to the content library UX and have to shift mindsets/learn a new pattern to use coach library.
consumption
COACH
CONTENT
- Consumption
ADMIN
- Users often miss the previous and next arrows in the header to navigate through learning content and use the sidebar instead.
- They believe they are complete but the UI is not which is confusing.
- Our customer's course creators actually ended up custom designing the first page to instructing users to use the top arrows... 😬
consumption
COACH only
CONTENT
- Insights (BEFORE)
sales manager
- Managers wanted more user centric insights.
- The current insights spoke more towards the admin persona.
- The UI seemed "dirty" due to the overuse of shadows.
Insights
coach only
Unifying Patterns
If it works the same, it should live the same
I mapped the parallels between Coach and the platform's Content product so any shared concept would sit in the same place and behave the same way. Containers, components, information, and comments each got a single consistent pattern instead of two competing ones.
Containers and components
COACH
A course holds media but also tests & PitchIQs
CONTENT
A page holds media, text, etc components
Terminology for identical concepts
COACH
Information = no title
Comments = "Discussion" button in header
CONTENT
Information = “Details” tab next to comments.
Comments = “Comments” tab in side panel next to details
Design Refinement
Detailed enough to build without guessing
I turned the direction into extensive flows that covered edge cases and spelled out how each feature should behave and animate.
The specs went down to drag and drop zones and interaction states so engineering could turn them into an interactive POC for testing. Logging bugs and improvements as we went kept quality tight through every release.
Design refinement & interactivity mock up
E2E flow mock ups
ex. of mocking drag and drop zones and interactions for developers to translate into an interactive POC for testing.
Beta testing
Key customers stress test at scale before full roll-out
Every feature ran through playtests and a beta with priority customers to catch bugs and odd behavior before it shipped.
ex. of bug and improvement logging
Platform Alignment Achieved
Four products, finally moving as one
The redesigned features shipped across creation, storage, consumption, and insights, bringing Coach into full alignment with the rest of the platform. What used to be four disconnected experiences now looks and behaves as one.
Alignment reached past the web app. Coach capabilities came to the Showpad iOS app alongside its existing content features, so the unified experience followed users onto mobile too.
- Creation
ADMIN
Creation
COACH
CONTENT
- Storage
ADMIN
storage
COACH
CONTENT
- Consumption
ADMIN
consumption
COACH
CONTENT
- Insights
Sales manager
Insights
bEFORE
AFTER
REFLECTION
Reduction in customer complaints is a lagging indicator
The 20% drop in complaint tickets told us the integration was working, but it's a lagging signal. It says something got better without telling you which change actually did the work. If I ran this again, I'd put more direct measures in place from the start, task success and time to complete on the core flows, so wins are something we can see and attribute instead of infer after the fact. There's also more to finish. A few of the gaps the content product never accounted for are still open, and any product still living outside the unified patterns is a candidate to pull in next. For a platform stitched together under a 2018 deadline, getting it to finally move as one was the milestone. Keeping it measurable is the next one.
SHOWPAD ✦ SHIPPED
Cross platform UX/UI integration overhaul
Platform
integration
Enterprise
Aligning UX and UI between a recently acquired LMS product and Showpad’s main content platform.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Skills
0 → 1 ∙ user research ∙ integration
Team
1 PM, 4 Eng, me
Timeline
JAN 2025 - JUN 2026
Summary
Deep Dive
OVERVIEW
Stitching a bolted on acquisition into one platform
Coach is Showpad's learning management product, acquired as LearnCore and never fully integrated. As lead product designer I led the effort to align it with the rest of the platform across visual design, architecture, and behavior, owning research through delivery.
Coach had run as a semi separate product for years, so aligning it meant reconciling genuinely different mental models and workflows, not just repainting screens.
OUTCOMES
20% fewer complaint tickets, one platform
Customer complaint tickets dropped by about 20% as the work rolled out, driven by steady UX improvements, quality of life updates, and cross platform unification. Four disjointed product areas now behave as one coherent platform.
The drop came from continuous improvement rather than one big release. Small fixes and pattern alignment compounded over time into fewer reasons for users to file a ticket in the first place.
-20%
complaints
customer complaint tickets were reduced by through continuous UX improvements and cross-platform product unification.
Business case
A 9 month rush left years of debt
When Showpad acquired LearnCore in 2018, the products were integrated in a 9 month rush. That left lasting gaps between the LMS and the rest of the platform in UX, systems, and interactions, and users felt it as friction and a steep learning curve.
Goals
- consistent visual design
- aligned product concepts and architecture
- cohesive UX and behavior patterns
- fewer customer complaints across Coach and the platform
Current State
Diving into customer complaints with interviews
I ran research interviews across all four products to pin down where users actually struggled. Support tickets were flagging the same issues in parallel, which confirmed the need for change and surfaced use cases the content product had never accounted for.
Interviews were captured through Meeting IQ transcription and organized into a structured spreadsheet of responses, so every pain point traced back to a real user rather than an assumption.
User Interviews
Spreadsheet of user answers to interview questions.
Screenshot of Showpad Meeting IQ transcription of user interviews.
Identified Gaps
Four facets, four frustrated personas
Coach breaks into four areas, each with its own primary user, and every one had friction. Creation was a slow save after save flow for admins, storage was hard to navigate, consumption hid the next and back controls from sales reps, and insights spoke to the wrong persona under a cluttered UI.
- Creation (BEFORE)
ADMIN
- Inefficient flow; steps are linear and require saving after each single one.
- Users want to a tool to build/draft them faster.
Creation
COACH
CONTENT
- Storage (BEFORE)
ADMIN
- UI is very confusing and doesn't not aid with findability.
- Cross platform users are used to the content library UX and have to shift mindsets/learn a new pattern to use coach library.
storage
COACH
CONTENT
- Consumption (BEFORE)
ADMIN
- Users often miss the previous and next arrows in the header to navigate through learning content and use the sidebar instead.
- They believe they are complete but the UI is not which is confusing.
- Our customer's course creators actually ended up custom designing the first page to instructing users to use the top arrows... 😬
consumption
COACH
CONTENT
- Insights (BEFORE)
Sales manager
- Managers wanted more user centric insights.
- The current insights spoke more towards the admin persona.
- The UI seemed "dirty" due to the overuse of shadows.
Insights
COACH only
Unifying Patterns
If it works the same, it should live the same
I mapped the parallels between Coach and the platform's Content product so any shared concept would sit in the same place and behave the same way. Containers, components, information, and comments each got a single consistent pattern instead of two competing ones.
Containers and components
COACH
A course holds media but also tests & PitchIQs
CONTENT
A page holds media, text, etc components
Terminology for identical concepts
COACH
Information = no title
Comments = "Discussion" button in header
CONTENT
Information = “Details” tab next to comments.
Comments = “Comments” tab in side panel next to details
Design Refinement
Detailed enough to build without guessing
I turned the direction into extensive flows that covered edge cases and spelled out how each feature should behave and animate.
The specs went down to drag and drop zones and interaction states so engineering could turn them into an interactive POC for testing. Logging bugs and improvements as we went kept quality tight through every release.
Design refinement & interactivity mock up
E2E flow mock ups
ex. of mocking drag and drop zones and interactions for developers to translate into an interactive POC for testing.
Beta testing
Key customers stress test at scale before full roll-out
Every feature ran through playtests and a beta with priority customers to catch bugs and odd behavior before it shipped.
ex. of bug and improvement logging
Platform Alignment Achieved
Four products, finally moving as one
The redesigned features shipped across creation, storage, consumption, and insights, bringing Coach into full alignment with the rest of the platform. What used to be four disconnected experiences now looks and behaves as one.
Alignment reached past the web app. Coach capabilities came to the Showpad iOS app alongside its existing content features, so the unified experience followed users onto mobile too.
- Creation (AFTER)
ADMIN
Creation
COACH
CONTENT
- Storage (AFTER)
ADMIN
storage
COACH
CONTENT
- Consumption (AFTER)
ADMIN
Desktop
COACH
CONTENT
- Insights
Sales manager
Insights
bEFORE
AFTER
REFLECTION
Reduction in customer complaints is a lagging indicator
The 20% drop in complaint tickets told us the integration was working, but it's a lagging signal. It says something got better without telling you which change actually did the work. If I ran this again, I'd put more direct measures in place from the start, task success and time to complete on the core flows, so wins are something we can see and attribute instead of infer after the fact. There's also more to finish. A few of the gaps the content product never accounted for are still open, and any product still living outside the unified patterns is a candidate to pull in next. For a platform stitched together under a 2018 deadline, getting it to finally move as one was the milestone. Keeping it measurable is the next one.